


a paradox of love and faith (or the winter of our grace)

by Nimravidae



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: A very Happy ending, Aziraphale will always be there to catch him, Break Up With Your God I'm Bored, Crowley is a Mess (Good Omens), Crowley is an Anxietywreck in Sunglasses, Fire, If you make it through the angst there is porn, It Has A Soft Landing, M/M, Messy and Inconsistent Love, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, South Downs Cottage (Good Omens), When Trauma Reenactment Goes Too Far, but you have to make it through the angst, flightless demons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-28
Updated: 2019-09-28
Packaged: 2020-10-28 14:42:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20780282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nimravidae/pseuds/Nimravidae
Summary: To love is to heal -- that is to say it is messy and inconsistent. Crowley struggles to find closure for past wounds, to yield to the idea that he could be loved as he has loved.It all comes to a head between relentless nightmares about God and an apple tree that won't grow apples.Luckily, Aziraphale is there to catch him should he Fall once more.Causalities include: A greenhouse, an indeterminate amount of plants, and a sense of self and place.





	a paradox of love and faith (or the winter of our grace)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [weatheredlaw](https://archiveofourown.org/users/weatheredlaw/gifts).

> This is gifted as a very belated birthday present to Weatheredlaw, the person that, without whom, I would probably write so little. She has held my hand, listened to me throw absolute fits, and assured me (as well as frequently editing my fics)
> 
> She is one of the most talented women I know and it has been an honor to call her a friend.
> 
> As for this fic itself: if you can make it through the angst, there's porn at the end.

"How could you come down from the Holy Place? And how, not loving God, can you love me?"  
-Alfred de Vigny, _Eloa, or the Sister of the Angels_

* * *

To speak in generals: Demons do not dream.

Ostensibly, this is because they do not sleep.

There exist two mechanisms, both of which entirely human, that are required for someone to dream. The first is the ability to sleep, the second is imagination.

Without imagination, what would dreams be but a tedious repetition of the days ahead of and behind oneself? Without the ability to imagine, dreams would be nothing but the quotidian repetition of life—nothing but everything you already know without the merciful release of the passage of time taking you step by step waltzing towards the moment when you no longer have need of time and no longer have need of the relentless drone of the day-in-day-out of life. Spinning hand-in-hand with nothing until you’re at the cliffside and nothing becomes someone wrapped in black.

And then what would be the point of dreaming?

You might as well stay awake.

Demons do not dream. Which makes it incredibly curious when a demon living in a cottage in the South Downs bolts upright in his bed for the eleventh night in a row, his thrumpulse heart beating unnecessarily hard in the back of his throat and his brow slick with an icy sweat.

Every inch of him is alight; his candlewick nerves smolder in the stretching darkness that collapses in around him, the sort of smother that doesn’t suffocate the ever-burn between his lungs. His ears ring with the echo of a voice he shouldn’t have been able to hear, a drill-pitch shriek that grates across his memories like silverware over ceramic, his mind churning over the memory of a face that isn’t (wasn’t ever) a face, something he doesn’t recognize and yet can’t _not _know.

The space beneath his temple throbs in time with the distant ticking of an angel-winged clock somewhere in the kitchen (too far for human ears to hear, too loud for Crowley to ignore. It’s loud, it’s all too loud. He misses London, where the loudness was silence and the silence was deafening. Here he can hear it all, the tide-pull of the ocean, the barking of the Millers’ dog, the idle-hum of Holy energy buzzing like electric currents in the library)

It burns, like his chest. An echo of searing pain—the burning agony of a thousand stars collapsing into the promise of a new universe. One that this time, he did not create. Foreign and familiar, known and unknown, new and ancient—a collapse like a vow, a future he doesn’t understand branded onto his flesh in the shape of a serpent (in the shape of himself).

It burns like Antioch, like the roof of the Temple of Artemis collapsing in over Crowley’s wings as he tried to extinguish Herostratus’ crimes (he would have told Hell he was preserving idolatry, if the ashchoke hadn’t shredded his lungs and blistered his flesh. If his smoke-stung eyes had been able to keep open for just a little while longer, if he hadn’t sworn he saw charcoal wings in the shadows of the flames long enough to distract himself from the task at hand.

In the end, they commended him for destroying something beautiful. He left the medal in the ruins.)

It burns like Rome, like feathers.

It burns like Her.

His hair falls loose from the messy knot he’s tied it up in. Piled, long and messy and wayward. Crowley rubs his face, grimacing as his hands come back slick.

He can count on two hands the amount of time he’s _sweat _in his life. (Well, three hands. Depends on how many fingers he feels like having. Blink once, and all eleven are on his two hands, blink again and they’re gone. The curious edges of his form, shivering and shuddering. Hands, claws, hands again—his Essence wraps, constricts, around his spinal column, unwilling to budge as it slithers up his throat and knots itself around the space beneath his jaw.)

He tries to reign in his panting, to stop the phantom-fires and pinch out the flames. Fuck.

_Fuck. _

Screwing his eyes shut, Crowley falls back down against the bed with a muted _whump, _arms and hand searching pointlessly along the other half of the bed. Aziraphale had been there when he fell asleep, had carded his fingers through Crowley’s hair and scratched along the scale-patches on his back until he was out.

Crowley’s grown used to having him there when he slept, but he’s also grown used to having him gone by the time he woke up. (He never thought he’d be used to that. Never thought of that as something he’d earn, something he’d deserve. _May you be forgiven. Forgiven? I won’t be forgiven, not ever. Unforgivable, that’s what I am. You were an angel once. _Still a demon, still unforgivable, unforgiven, but Aziraphale took him under wing and arm anyway. Took his face in hand.)

They had fallen together, once afternoon, a whispersoft touch somewhere between the second and third glass of whiskey, somewhere between a bookshop in Soho and a flat in Mayfair. Somewhere between six thousand years and another five weeks. A waltz, if either of them knew how to dance (_it’s not that hard, is it? Right right back back left left forward forward, come on now, do it with me — hand in mine don’t think about Romeo don’t think about Juliet and holy palmers’ kisses. Just this, right back left forward, one box, right back left forward, one box. Lead and I’ll follow, lead me anywhere and I will follow you. Anywhere you wish, hand-in-mine and you can remake the steps, three-four time or whatever you want. I’ll spin my nights away on the head of a pin, in your back office, in the sitting room of my flat, on the streets, in the park, in gardens and rooftops. Anywhere, we don’t even have to dance. Just lead and I’ll follow.)_

That’s the thing about dances, they only last a measure of time. A blissful few minutes floating along with Chopin or Strauss II or Tchaikovsky (_sleeping beauty, don’t think about kiss me, don’t think don’t think about sleeping, don’t think about the poison-prick of spinning wheels, don’t think about the ruination it brings, the forever-sleep of lovelessness. Whatever you do, don’t think about apples). _

Then it ends.

Crowley lies there, hand sweeping the coldwrinkle of the abandoned half of the bed, and listens for the rustle of paper, the muttering of words unintelligible, the occasional clink of metal to porcelain as Aziraphale stirs a fresh cup of tea in the next room (sugar, cream, swirling together in the angel-winged mug. Crowley had bought it for him ages ago, a sort of laugh. The sort of laugh that froze into a knot in his throat the first time he saw it, use-stained, on the table in the back office).

It doesn’t come. It’s silence, relatively speaking. The dogs still bark, the world still grinds, the ocean still pulls and pushes its sisyphean battle up the shoreline.

Swearing under his breath, he works up a silent plea to no one that Aziraphale isn’t paying attention, that he is too deep in his books to clue into the stench of demonic fear (not fear, demons don’t feel _fear) _that starts to permeate the room. It smells like an Essence shuddering and withdrawing, smells like the freeze of a preternatural winter and the moments right after lightning torches a barn.

The light in the hall flicks on, a prelude to the soft, concerned, “Crowley?”

Alright, well fuck him then, right?

If he had the foresight to recognize that something like this might happen, Crowley never would have agreed to the cohabitation. He should have considered it, he should have considered what he was like when he was by himself, should have considered that it wasn’t appropriate in Aziraphale’s company.

From the moment they sat there, fingers brushing one another's on a bus bound inexplicably for London, he had been so lost in the bubbling sensation that centralized somewhere behind his occipital lobe. Like a good champagne, Aziraphale had made him dizzy, had wrenched all reason and sense from him and left him with nothing.

Kissing him had been gin, the bite and botanics reminding him of the scent-taste of Eden. Making love had been absinthe. Every sense of reason and logic, the restraints that bound him down, snapped, and within six months they were lying in a pool of blankets and silks, fingers running up and down skin.

Crowley had traced the constellations over Aziraphale’s back, again and again, reinventing them anew and following the lines of muscles and veins. All the sensitive parts that made up a corporeal body.

Bones and skin and feather things. They talked about leaving, about how crowded London had gotten. They talked about exhaustion and hiding and shucking off their pasts the way Crowley did old coats and Aziraphale did nothing.

The more they talked, the more they traded touches and kisses, the more real it felt, breathing life into conceptualizations, into reality. Though, if wishing alone made it so, Crowley would have had Aziraphale tangled up in arm and wing and his back pressed against the floor of the sandrough Eden gate. If wishing alone made it so, there wouldn’t have ever been a moment without Aziraphale.

The more they talked, the more real it became.

Their Essences started to seep in their exhaustion, Crowley’s ash-claws leaving charcoal scars down the pale expanse of Aziraphale’s skin.

Aziraphale closed all thousand eyes he had to revel in the sensation.

They imagined the cottage in that moment, and in the next it was there (feeling increasingly real until it was). A perfect squat little thing in the South Downs in just the perfect place, with one bedroom, two studies, a library that always seemed much bigger than it was, a garden, a kitchen, and a greenhouse.

It wasn’t until their first guest that they remembered to tack a washroom there somewhere.

Never really struck Crowley that living with Aziraphale meant living _with_ Aziraphale. He’d thought, before, it would be like it was at the shop. The six months he spent never leaving his side, the six months he spent curled around him, the six months he spent touching and kissing and lying together. Now it was three years.

Drawing his hands up from below his chest and snapping, Crowley flexes a bit of that hellish power to clean himself up — scrub the salt water from his cheeks and the sweat from his hair. Even deposit his sunglasses back on his nose.

Cohabitation came with cost and benefit. He has Aziraphale now, he’s wrapped his arms around him, wrapped his legs around him—he’s free to touch him.

(Something he’d wanted to do for six thousand years, something that had burned between the whorls of his fingerprints, that ached between every fiber of his being, ever follicle of hair on his arms, yearning and stretching towards him. There had been times, in the bookshop, wine-drunk and whiskey-warm, where Crowley very nearly did it. Where he twitched his patiencethin fingers towards Aziraphale’s sleeve, where he brushed the edge of the fabric as if taunting himself, edging out the risk-reward of how it would feel to bury his nose in the veinnest of his wrist and breathe him in. How it would feel to taste the pulsepoint of his wrist. Would it taste the same at his throat? In his fantasies, that spot on Aziraphale’s throat—with his bowtie loose around his collar and the top buttons scandalously split and skin made vulnerable to the hotwant light of night—it tasted like the last dredges of whiskey at the bottom of his cup.

In his fantasies, Aziraphale was silent. In reality, as Crowley knew after six months of swirling the waters of experience, Aziraphale would moan—head thrown back and the pale stretch of his soft throat exposed to the fangpress of Crowley’s mouth. He’d moan and beg for more. It’s substantially better.)

That’s the nature of getting what you want, isn’t it? A balance, a trade-off—he can touch Aziraphale, ghost his lips down the expanse of his chest, tongue the divots between his hips and his thighs, bury his nose in the soft edges of him, feel the steelbone strength that shudders beneath the cord of muscle and sinew. He gets him, he _gets _him.

A breath, as he counts the moments between the soft shuffle of feet over flooring from the library, the hallway. His skin aches, a burn crawling up from his back and curling around his shoulders to whisper in his ear.

He gets Aziraphale, but there’s no hiding from him. He’s sharp (too-clever, too-smart. He’s sharp in the way the rose thorns are sharp, in the thumb-pressing of a fresh blade, of the wire between warzones. Sharp in the flesh-hot sense, in the sense that the hard edge of a flaming sword is sharp).

His nightmare echoes around him, not yet forgotten in the cold swarth of night, as the buzzing edges of Aziraphale’s holyfire energy slithers closer. It comes up under the door, filling the gaps around them before he can smell the hesitation on the other side of the door. Aziraphale has always been too big for himself, too expansive for the confines of flesh and bone. He tucks himself in at the edges, the fitted-sheet fold of his Essence unfurling and re-coiling like an eternal dance. A sway, a pirouette around himself, with tendrils reaching out with cautious want and need for things Crowley doesn’t understand.

Aziraphale reaches outward and Crowley pretends he doesn’t reach up—a starless night seeking the stretches of light above him. Things he’s not permitted anymore. (_Rebel, rule-breaker, you’re not allowed to want it, you’re not allowed to think about it. But you were never good at following directions, at taking orders to heart and seeing them through. Got you in this mess in the first place, didn’t it?)_

For a moment, that tripwire voice in the back of his mind sounds half-familiar, like a half-dreamed ghost of a memory and the scent of cigarette smoke that smells like the cathedral ruins of a burning bookshop. It lingers around the cliffaces in his mind, the places where this time, when you wander off the edges, you don’t drown. It’s the fall that’ll kill you.

_You’ll poison him. _

It feels like Her—at least he _thinks _it feels like Her. He hasn’t felt Her in well over six thousand years.

_My little rotten apple. You’ll spoil the whole barrel. _

He shudders, kicking the blankets off and pouring himself out onto the floor. He dresses with a thought, just as Aziraphale creaks the door open, shuffling through. “Another one?” he asks, as Crowley adjusts his sunglasses.

“‘Nother what, angel?” He feigns ignorance because the only other option is to stop shaking. He glances at the clock on his nightstand, half-buried under abandoned pairs of glasses and a book Aziraphale found him on gardening. Nearly three in the morning.

“Another nightmare,” Aziraphale says, hands twisting his pinky ring around his finger like he might be able to shake loose some answer from himself. “You’ve been having them quite a bit.”

He debates a lie, the little pebble of it rolling around in the cavernous pit of himself. It echoes, rocking through everything and nothing at once before it tips back up through his throat and settles, balanced, on the tip of his tongue.

“Wasn’t bad,” he says, the lie-shaped stone hitting the ground between them with a half-sharp sound.

Aziraphale stares at him like he knows he’s lied, like six thousand years has gotten him awfully talented at recognizing when Crowley is lying, at being able to sort the quotidian demonic urges from the symptomatically serious falsehoods that stick to the roof of his mouth.

It’s clear where the die ends up cast, when Aziraphale just lifts his hand from where it had stretched across the doorway, backlit by the gold-cast glow of the hallway lamp. Like lifting a rope, a silent agreement of _we both know you're lying but you might shatter if I push and the last thing I want right now is for you to run off back to London._

If he wanted to, Crowley could think of some truly poignant and aching thoughts about halos and burning and fire. His tongue tastes like the vinegar of spoilt wine. He doesn't think about halos or burning.

Instead he gets up, rubbing down his face.

Aziraphale backs into the hall. “Are you going to garden?” It’s an innocuous question in the same way the sea in the eye of the storm is peaceful.

Crowley sniffs and pushes his glasses further up his nose. “Yep. Bushes need pruning.” They don’t, but Crowley can’t be here. Aziraphale’s gaze swallows him like the ocean, waves crashing into his lungs and filling him from the inside out with brackish water.

“Right.”

Right. That’s all they say anymore. _Right. _

_Right, the bushes need pruning, just like there were weeds in your marigolds and your roses were in want of some water. Right, you have a rough rising in the kitchen you ought to get back to. Right, you don’t know what to say in moments like these. _

_Right, it’s fine. Right, no I understand. _

_Right. _

He should say something else, he should turn and close the gap between them, toe to toe and hands on cheeks and the insistent points of contact between them. He should breathe in Aziraphale and kiss him until they’re both breathless, until Crowley can goad him back to bed and pull them together and work the boundaries of flesh and bone into nothing—break them apart at the seams, shatter themselves out against one another.

He doesn’t.

He keeps walking despite how heavy blue feels against his shoulders.

Aziraphale doesn’t want to hear about it — Crowley knows that much. He doesn’t want to hear about the dreams, about Her voice echoing around him. He’d just pull that same expression, the too-tight too-laced sort of frown, insist it was nothing but a dream, a nightmare. She’d never say those things.

No, Crowley knows. She’d say much worse.

Or, worse again, She wouldn’t say anything.

The space beneath his ear burns with the phantom pain of Her whitehot Self wrenching him apart. She’d said something, then, the whip-wild sound of Her voice needling through his Ethereal bounds and pushing itself into his Essence. What it was, he doesn’t remember.

The back door clatters shut behind him and the first hit of the late-summer Earth rolls in on a Hell-summoned breeze and wraps around him. He breathes her in, lips parted to roll the scent-taste over his tongue.

Eden had a particular smell to it. Being Heaven-made and situated in the salt-sand expanse of desert, it carried a curious undercurrent of electric fire, ylang-ylang, and salt. Crowley would split his fang-filled mouth and flick his tongue to taste it. It always smelled like the animals that Adam named, as well—though back then Crowley couldn’t distinguish them, lion from peacock from lizard. All he knew was what a snake smelled like.

Hellfire. Rot. Like the cling of dead things and the bone-break of Falling. Snakes smell like all the ruination of Hell, the dust of collapsed civilizations and the ash-piled-onto-ash of Constantinople.

Crowley stands, for a moment, on the concrete step that leads down into the back garden. His garden doesn’t smell like Eden—at least not quite the same. The salt on the breeze isn’t the same, it’s not blister-hot and burning, there’s no razor edge of electric fire beneath it all, no stench of anxiety and fear of being so close to another angel for the first time since he burned out with his stars.

It smells like a garden outside a little cottage in the South Downs. Like tilled soil and crashing waves, like lavender and the neighbors’ roses mixed with his own.

Crowley has always been a gardener. He had been there, between the Tigris and Euphrates, soil beneath his fingers, in the place humans thought was Eden. It wasn’t. It was close—incredibly close. The memories had been fresh when Crowley knelt in the soil, digging his fingers into cooldark earth, wondering if he dug down deep enough, he could bury the memory of the bonebright feathers and eyes the color of the Eden sky back before it had been anything _but _blue.

He’d spend hours toiling alongside his sunblistered company, staying long after they’d quit the fields and gone home. He’d stayed through the night, urging forth blossoms and blooms—lips pressed to soil, whispering into the endless dark of the ground beneath him. _Come on, come back to me — prove that I haven’t really cocked this all up. _

Those first little weeds had curled themselves up from his stomach, the places where he swallowed seeds from the fruits of Eden (not apples, never apples. He never wanted to know what those tasted like) — they reminded him of those first few nights, the first few years under the first few sunrises and first few spins on a dusty planet circling the star he cut from his chest. He had watched Eve. He followed, clinging to shadows and sand.

He was there when Abel was born; he was too slow to stay Cain’s hand. _Not Abraham’s, though. You learned from Cain, you learned with your feet stained in the red of the first murder, learning how hot blood was, how badly it stained, seeped into the cracks and crevice of your skin. _

_You learned that night what true evil was. You learned what you’ve done. You learned how badly you ruined the thing She loved._

_You learned. Watching rage burn out, watching the first human die. That was the night you learned how much blood pulsed through the human body, how it looked like soaking the Earth, staining her, staining you. You learned from Abel. _

_Demons don’t bleed red, but it spread across the altar anyway, martyrblood hair, flowing in sprint-tangled knots as ashwater black dripped from under Abraham’s knife—in your worst nights, you can still hear Isaac’s terrified breathing, still feel the cut on your palm. (Take the lamb, take me — I can be your sacrifice. I don’t know what you wanted from me, I don’t know what you still want from me so just take me. Let me. Just don’t, don’t let him do it. Don’t let me be too slow again, don’t let me fuck this up.)_

In the space between rivers, melons grew. As did barley and wheat. Cucumbers, leeks, beetroot, all grew in the shade of the palms, tended under Crowley’s hand. He brought them water, buckets back and forth; he sat among them, leaves whispering back to him in the sandsalt wind.

She drowned his gardens too.

He had always been a gardener. _Always_.

He had always wanted to create things.

_Up to the perpetual shade where Chaos begins. _

Aziraphale had once read him a poem, one hand propping open his book while the other detangled the sleepknots that wrapped up behind his ears. When he reached points he had memorized, he set it down, buried his hands in Crowley’s hair, braiding and unbraiding and braiding again. There were many moments, many points where he’d read the words thousands of times, between the moment it fell into his hands to the moment they sprawled over the sofa, his cheek pillowed on a warm thigh.

_Space is empty, sad, dark, and furrowed. _(Except when it wasn’t. Except when it was bursting with color, except when there were angels, breathing in the stardust starstuff—taking in the taste of everything and nothing, letting it mix with himself, letting it touch the spaces between his atoms and mingle with the touch of his Essence, married to the static-touch of Light and Love—and exhaling nebulae and starlight. A twitch of fingers, a tendril of angelic Grace, and a strand of red tying it together and, with a touch, pinning it up to the blackness above him. Divinely breathed, the suns and stars.)

He blinks up into the summerbuzz night, the stars clinging cold and aloof. They don’t blink back at him, they don’t shimmer and sing to him the way they used to. That magic tableau of the shining stars.

Space is empty now. Sad. Dark. Furrowed. Empty without him.

_(Or maybe that’s him. Hollowed out and empty, the places where he used to burn with starstuff, the places where he used to burst with color and fire. Sad. Dark. _

_A shipwreck of his stars.) _

He doesn’t have his stars anymore, he doesn’t have the hollow-cheeked taste of a burning atmosphere under his tongue, he doesn’t have the eternal collapse-uncollapse of spacethings and dust under his fingernails or the shiver of nebulae twisting between his feathers.

She took away the stars like she took away his wings; the broken rush of broken air would never lift him again. There was no more soaring, no more diving, no more twisting. (If demons could fly, they wouldn’t have fallen. Clear as day. Crowley could try — he does try. He always ends up smeared in black-blood and broken-edged, on his knees in the ash and waxmud of his own hubris.)

Because Heaven-and-Hell forbid he ever got too close to his stars.

She took those away when she carved the sins he’d yet to commit into him, when she took away his name. Snatched it from his throat and buried it somewhere between Spica and Antares, the ghost of who he wasn’t anymore burning back down from the night sky.

It rolls over the back of his tongue, in a language he can’t ever speak again.

His garden has all the elements of a proper garden, aster and roses and a little patch where he keeps his herbs well tended to (fresh rosemary, for Aziraphale, and basil and mint there too. Plenty of parsley, because Crowley likes the freshbright taste of it whenever Aziraphale decides to cook with it). He even has a greenhouse.

It had come with the place, written into the sand back when they were still split between a bookshop in Soho and a Mayfair flat. Aziraphale’s idea, as he was busying himself sweeping his palms up the expanse of Crowley’s ribcage, toying with the touch of him, playing him out like a harp in the post-fuck smear of them both.

_A greenhouse, _he’d hummed, nose to the space beneath Crowley’s ear. _You should have a greenhouse too. Place to keep all your plants in the winter._

Teeth bared, a playful nip at Aziraphale’s temple. _Wouldn’t dare let them wilt, even in the winter._

_You’d do well with one. A hothouse, maybe? _

Aziraphale had told him what he’d thought it would be. A towering thing, with windows and glass panes and dark wrought-steel holding it all together. _It would be bursting with color on the inside, wouldn’t it, love? _

_Mmm. For you, angel? Always. _

It shivered into existence that night, like the rest of the cottage—a twin effort of their selves.

Deeper in his garden, past the aster that straighten as he trods through, past the marigolds that shiver and the blossoming tulips—there’s a story that has been told time and time again.

We know the story about serpents and a story about sin—the temptation and the downfall.

So it serves as no surprise to learn that, deep in the heart of Crowley’s garden, in a place so like and unlike Eden (the salt-smell, the sand, the angel somewhere outside its boundaries there, a humming sense of angelic grace always lingering), there sits an apple tree.

Crowley wanders, dragging his fingers down the petalsoft touch of the rose bushes that line the well-worn garden path. His feet drag him without his permission, guiding him through until he’s standing in the moon-cast shadow of its fruit-barren leaves.

It’s late summer.

Apple season.

The tree had been one of the last-first things Crowley had planted when they’d moved to their little cottage. It danced around his mind, a perfect waltz in the tune of _Grande valse villageoise. _A sway, a dance, with windrustle leaves whispering out to him, a siren-call of knowledge just beyond his fingertips—he never ate the apple in Eden.

He didn’t want to know. (She showed him anyway, She showed him the future and the past, she showed him all the things he was going to be, all the things he was going to do. She made him and she unmade him—shattered him apart and collected the broken shards of him into something different.

Worse.

Dangerous.

He never needed to eat the fucking apple. She grew the seeds of them in his throat.)

He planted the tree; it never grew a single fruit.

All bark, no apples to bite.

Barren for three consecutive years. No matter how much Crowley scorned and snarled and threatened to dig it up and replace it with a concrete bird bath _you fucking useless piece of shite. Just grow a goddamn apple—grow one fucking apple, how fucking pointless are you, now? You’ve got one job, you’ve always got one job and you’ve fucked the whole thing up—just for someone’s sake grow, grow, _grow.

Crowley tries, for what it’s worth, not to think about why. To not consider the empty green above him and know, _know, _that even if he swallowed the seeds himself, even if he turned his body to dirt and soil and laid down to push the first tendrils of roots through his body, it will _never _grow apples.

The closest thing he’ll ever get is the sickly sweet of rotten fruit. Nothing living was ever made to course through his veins, nothing living was ever meant to flourish beneath him.

She took this away from him too.

He stands in the shadows of the apple tree, hands in his pockets and shades on his nose.

She’ll take it all away. One by one.

Until he’s back down in the boneshatter wastelands of sulfur and blood—alone and freezing.

No stars, no name, no wings, no apple trees, no Aziraphale.

Nothing but himself and the space between the leaves.

Sounds fucking awful, if you ask him. Not that anyone does, of course. No one asks him as he stands there until the rosewindow dawn starts to creep over the horizon, the grass surrounding him growing more and more dewdamp by the moment. He stands and stares in the breathless sort of quiet, wondering if he stood still enough if he could plant himself into the soil—if roots would threat from the soles of his snakeskin boots and push, push, push down deep into the coldrich Earth. He wonders if he could reach past Hell, wrapping the wiry tendrils of himself around the ball of torment and bastardy that sinks endlessly into the core of the planet. If he could choke the fossils and puppet them.

If he stood there long enough, would he wither and rot away?

Fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately, Crowley isn’t sure anymore), he isn’t given much of a choice. The unrepentant march of time continues on. Mrs. Morris—one of the old ladies from down the road—walks her yappy little terrier past the garden gate, waves hello, and Crowley can already hear Aziraphale’s worry building beyond what he can readily manage.

All Crowley spares is another glance back towards the tree, leaves rustling in the windless morning.

He finds Aziraphale back in the kitchen, busying himself over a cup of tea. There’s already a mug at Crowley’s place, filled with coffee.

_Right. We don’t talk about it. We never talk about it. _

Crowley pulls out his chair, takes his seat. They don’t talk about it, but if they did, he’s fairly certain of how the conversation would go.

_You’re being ridiculous, Crowley. None of that is real and I’m quite certain you know that._

_There’s no reason to be so upset. She wouldn’t do such a thing, She wouldn’t taunt you like this. She’d never, She’d never, She’d never. _

It would be _mercy _and _grace. _It would be _well obviously Heaven can’t be behind this _and _really, dear, isn’t this more the sort of thing we’d expect from your lot? _

Never Heaven’s fault, never Her fault. It’s always those wicked demons, always the plots of Hell, always the grand ineffable game of _good _versus _evil _where Aziraphale is clearly aware of which one is which.

Crowley scratches under his jaw and stares down into his cup, nudging up his sunglasses as Aziraphale takes his seat across from him with a soft sigh.

In terms of celestial bodies, caffeine by itself shouldn’t necessarily have any effect on Crowley one way or the other. Neither should wine, or whiskey, or the good scotch he keeps in his study. The process, on a biological level, doesn’t quite work the same way. Crowley doesn’t take a long drink from his mug, let it absorb, let it sink into his bloodstream and pump through his blood. It doesn’t fire switches, it doesn’t wake him up on any chemical level (chemicals are human things, nitrogen, oxygen, trimethylxanthine. Angels are made of light, of concepts coalesced into a shape of their own choosing—the vast density of love and grace pressed into being.

Then what are demons? Crowley doesn’t think about that. He doesn’t grip whiteknuckled at his mug and think about what demons must be made of).

To get drunk, to feel the insistent buzz of caffeination behind his eyes, is not science.

It is, as many things are, imagination and belief.

If Crowley believed a cup of coffee (or two or four or six before noon) would dredge up a sense of _everything is fine, no really, it’s all fine, there’s nothing wrong. Not here, not in my chest, not under my tongue. Nothing is wrong, _then it would. If he had it in the morning, it would rub the exhaustion from the places where he should be filled with bone marrow and cartilage and other bits of human flesh. The spaces between his ribs, the spaces between his vertebrae.

If he had it at night, it would leave him awake, staring at the ceiling with a teethchattering anxietyfuck of himself sprawled out over the bed with a rapid-fire pulse chewing on his throat wondering if _this time this time this time _will be the night he hears the front gate swing open and gets up to find Aziraphale gone.

If this time, when he wakes up to a cold bedside there will be no bonebright grace in the kitchen, there will be no angel in his library, there will be no books, no tea, no absolutely ridiculous clock with angel’s wings on it that keep falling off, but which Aziraphale refuses to miracle and instead keeps using tape to mend.

Lying there, a mess of himself, waiting for him to change his mind, waiting for him to realize the mistakes that he’s made, waiting for him to come around, to remember that Crowley is a demon.

Hereditary enemies. That’s what they are, aren’t they?

He can’t even grow apples.

The silence lasts through Aziraphale’s first content-hummed sip. “How are the begonias?”

“Hmm,” comes Crowley’s expert reply, eyes raking up from his cup.

A brow raises across the table, that sort of _well? Are you listening to me? _arch. “Your begonias? You were telling me about them yesterday—said you ought to go menace them again, make sure they’re, erm, what was that colorful phrasing you used?”

“Properly terrified?” Crowley guesses, eyes flickering towards the window. The dawnlight is filtering out, replaced by the slow brilliance of the morning. It’ll go like it does every morning, a creeping wash of golden light meandering and swaying slowly towards Aziraphale’s chair. If he’s lucky, if he keeps him chattering away about something—about a poem, about a book, about what tea he’s having this morning or what he’s planning doing about town today—if he’s very lucky, Aziraphale will stay in his seat.

If he’s even luckier, he’ll stay there long enough for the morning glow to catch him, to finish its lazy waltz across their kitchen floor and climb up his house clothes and tangle in his hair. His bedsheet white hair will catch it all, the palepress of his skin will glow and send the light cascading back out, a mess of particles and firelight. (Sometimes, if he’s gotten him on a tangent, it brushes down the side of his face, line of brilliance cutting across his lips in a way that makes Crowley wonder if it’s possible to taste the sunlight. Three years they’ve been together and still the knowledge, the _idea, _that he could lean across the table and test his theory is beyond his grasp.)

Aziraphale is always beautiful, but those mornings are something else. In those mornings, he can taste the rain-soaked sand and the holy-crackle of the first lightning.

This isn’t one of those mornings. Or well, it might not be. They haven’t had a morning like that since Crowley started having his nightmares, since that first morning Aziraphale fussed over him, smoothing back his hair and letting him sink into the touches, to press into his hands and assure him between softworry murmurs that _it’s fine, I’m fine, dove — promise. _

“That’s not it.” Aziraphale waves a hand, as if dismissing the whole idea. “I’m sure it’s not important.”

They don’t talk about it.

Crowley grunts into his coffee. “The begonias are coming in fine, now. Been properly menaced into behaving.” They’re not, but he’s a demon — he lies. It’s what he does. Better Aziraphale remember sooner rather than later, right? It’s better he recalls now, that some sour look scrunches a worryfurrow at his brow and he recalls exactly why he kept his distance.

Demons poison things, ruin things.

He is Abelblood red, staining the Earth with appleskin. He can feel it behind his teeth as Aziraphale hums like he’s pleased, like he doesn’t realize who he’s sitting across the table from. _Do you remember? _he wants to scream. _Do you remember standing next to me, the midwife of sin, the serpent who soiled all of humanity — do you remember? Do you care? How do you love me? How do you love me? How do you love me, knowing what I am—are you seeing through this, are you blinded to our past? Do you remember that night in the ashfuck ruin of Rome? The way you bared your teeth and grabbed me by the collar—did you do this did you do this, you’d snarled, your flashwhite canines glinting back the firelight. _

_Do you remember? Do you remember how your eyes weren’t filled with an ocean of pitch-burned rage but an icestorm of fear? Do you remember being terrified of me?_

“Good,” Aziraphale says, cup half-drained and light hardly halfway through its movement. (Two steps to the right, two steps back, two steps to the left, two steps forward. A basic waltz across their kitchen floor—there’s a record in the library, nothing playing but Crowley can hear it as his eyes fall down the edges of light and shadow.) “Good to hear.”

More silence, broken only by the chirp of morning birds outside the windows, the sound of coffee and tea, of cups being placed back down on their table, the hum of cars, of brisk morning walks outside their gate, of the distant crash-pull of tidal waves and the even more distant whisper of the conversations they are not having.

It’s fine, though. They don’t talk about it.

“So.” The teacup clinks against a saucer, an indelicate sound. Aziraphale’s nervous. Crowley can taste it on the back of his tongue. It tastes like charcoal and burn. “Are we going to discuss it?”

Crowley blinks back, brow pinching behind the glass and metal of his sunglasses (he should take them off, pretend like it’s fine—but even the twitch of his fingers towards them makes his rapid-fire heart rattle away in his bonecage chest.)

He sniffs once, glances away from the window, away from Aziraphale. He looks towards the hall, the places where the morning light is just barely starting to disperse. It is still dark, still shadowed, still cold with the stench of his nightmare. “Discuss what?”

“Really, Crowley?” Aziraphale says, patience mixing up with the last dredges of his tea. “This was the eleventh night in a row—I’m beginning to think that maybe sleeping isn’t all that good for your sort.”

_His sort._

Crowley stiffens the curl of his lip away, keeps it still. Good thing he kept the sunglasses, good thing he keeps his gaze trained on the hall. Her dream-voice echoes around him, a piercing whisper curled just under his right ear. _You’ll burn him out. You’ll rot him. You’ll bring him down with you, drowning in the flood-waters, no ravens, no crows, no signs. He’ll come down with you. Hand-in-unlovable-hand. _

“Might be right, angel,” he says. His coffee cup is still nearly full and long-cold around his spiderweb fingers. Doesn’t mean he’ll stop, though. He isn’t sure why, isn’t sure what he’s got to prove—part of him, the part of him that sears under the phantom pain of Her incomprehensible love, knows it wasn’t Her. She’d never whisper in his dreams. If She wanted to talk to him, She’d set something on fire, She’d burn his eyes from the back of his mind, She’d turn a lake to sulfur and pull Her message word by word from his own teeth.

She’d send lackies, She’d peel Aziraphale’s eyes back like paint and wrench his voice from under him, a conduit to the snarling denouncement that would be Her final blow.

Aziraphale doesn’t sit at the table much longer; he doesn’t linger. He makes a soft noise from the back of his throat and rinses out his cup and sets it out to dry. “Well, then. I’ve a book to re-bind,” he says, instead of a proper goodbye, and vanishes back out into his library. Crowley lingers, watches the golden light slowly creep, filling the kitchen, filling the spaces Aziraphale left behind.

He doesn’t finish his coffee; he goes back out into the garden.

When the sun sets, a slow descent back into her resting place, Crowley doesn’t come inside for a long while. He wanders the foot-worn path through his garden, walks through his greenhouse, mists the plants, checks them over again and again, before circling back around to the rear of the house.

There’s an old metal ladder there, not rusted—no, because nothing rusts here. Nothing rusts or aches or ages. It leads up to the flat top of the roof, right before it cuts to make the high ceiling for their living room, stretching up towards the skies. He climbs up and stretches, arms above his head, wings beating themselves into the corporeal plane.

Demons can’t fly. Doesn’t mean they don’t miss it.

On better (and worse) nights, Crowley comes up here to remember what it was like. He sprints from the heelclick of the chimney stack to the edge and off into the trees, momentum carrying him in some bitter mockery of flight.

Most nights, he misses. Most nights, he falls. Most nights, he lands hard on his back, in the mudslick mess of himself and the shatter-impact memory of the emptyblack void of Hell. The place littered with the mangled remains of brothers and sisters and siblings, a present-tense pain reverberating through the phantom ache of Falling. (Not tonight.)

There’s a storm on the horizon — not yet, where he can see the clouds starting to form, water vapor curling together and together and together until it’s too swollen to continue clinging up to the stars. He can smell it, though, when he parts his lips and feels the press of it against his tongue.

It smells like a barometric drop in pressure, like the richness of wet earth and the thrumpulse of the skies starting to split apart at their seams, dropping thunder and lightning and rainwater down over them.

(If he closes his eyes, it smells like the last day in Eden. The night before Eve sunk her teeth into the apple. The last night of tranquility. If he closes his eyes, it smells like the moments before his worst sin.)

Crowley doesn’t try to fly tonight; he toes the edges of the rooftop and listens to the stillnight around him. Birds, the dogs snuffling and barking in the distance. There’s the teacup clatter of Aziraphale in the house, the electric hum of the lamplights in the distance, the sound of someone’s late-night shower, the sound of someone’s late-night fucking.

London used to be so quiet, sound drowning out sound. So silent-loud it was impossible to get lost in the thunderclap thoughts that echoed around the space between his tongue and his throat.

It couldn’t have been Her. _It couldn’t. She doesn’t want to talk to him, She doesn’t want to talk to him anymore. _

It couldn’t have been. Eleven days, eleven nights. (_is it going to be forty? Is that how long he’s going to suffer? Forty days and forty nights under the relentless pound of her voice against his ears, rattling around his skull like a bullet—drowning him. Penance, for the hands he reached through the cresting water, penance for those he pulled from the flood. For those he forced their hearts to keep beating under his hands and filled their lungs with his borrowed air — what’s chemicals to a demon? Oxygen, Nitrogen. Take it all.) _

“Tell me,” he says, hands in his pockets and eyes turned up towards the coldblack skies far from his grounded reach. “If it’s you. Tell me. Go on, you’ve never been shy with it before. Set a bush on fire—that one—” he wriggles a hand free, points. “Been misbehaving, go on, make it, make it burn, tell me whatever it is you want to tell me. Open line of communication here, you want to tell me something, then tell me.”

Not even the wind responds.

“Right. Okay.” Crowley sniffs, pushing his hand back into his too-small pockets. “Gave it a shot, right. Can’t blame a demon for trying.”

Aziraphale isn’t in bed when Crowley goes inside. The lamplight glow creeps out from under the door to the library (shut fast, the _don’t disturb me, I’m busy, I’m wrapped up in my work and my mind _unsaid).

He shouldn’t sleep, he shouldn’t latch himself to the sinking boat of his own mind, but he does anyway. He peels back the greyscale sheets and slides between the silk (on the left side of the bed. He always sleeps on the left side of the bed, Aziraphale insists on being closest to the door. _I’m not going to sleep, dear, it’s easier. I won’t wake you that way if I pop out for a spot of tea.) _

Crowley really shouldn’t sleep, not if the last eleven nights have taught him anything.

But really, when has he been good at listening to what’s best for him? He has the scars to prove that much. The burnblack lines where his eyes used to be, where he used to be able to turn a thousand of them up to the skies, to watch everywhere at once and see Her with every blink. She sealed them shut.

Blinded him.

She dug into the cracks where he’d begin to splinter and wrenched him open, She cracked his sternum, tore the things She gave him out—She laid him in Her lap and ripped the Love, the Grace, the Light. Seam by seam, popping all the things that held him together until he unraveled in a cavalcade of agony.

She tore him apart and put him back together wrong.

Self-preservation has never been his strongest instinct.

He buries his nose in Aziraphale’s pillow and drifts off within moments of shutting his eyes.

Immediately afterwards, all Hell breaks loose.

There exist two mechanisms, both entirely human, that are required for someone to dream. The first is the ability to sleep, the second is imagination. Something Crowley has in abundance. Without imagination, what would dreams be but a tedious repetition of the days ahead of and behind oneself? (We’ve already talked about this, we already know.)

Without imagination, you might as well stay awake.

The last eleven nights have seen Crowley’s dreamscapes sending him to voidblack wastelands, to places he doesn’t recognize (a frostbitten sweep of nothingness that feels like the space between his sternum and his spine, a lightless stretch of frozen air that could have been the atmosphere. Could have been _everything _and _nothing _in the time before someone hung the first star there. Before someone inhaled _nothing _and exhaled a universe).

Every time it had been just him, him and the cavernecho of Her voice, whipwild around him, always behind him no matter how quickly he turned.

Tonight, it’s Hell on Earth. The cinderchoke stench of flames stings at his eyes (no sunglasses, _why aren’t I wearing my sunglasses? Where—where am I? What am I wearing it’s—where am I) _and his fearruin heart thudding away in his chest.

He blinks, and it’s Rome—it’s always Rome, it’s always the scratch-sound of Nero’s fucking fiddle and the spoilt-wine vinegar of adrenaline on the back of his tongue. It’s always that night, it’s always grabbing red-slick hands and pulling, it’s always shoving bodies towards the boundaries of the flames, places where it’s safe, places where they’ll be okay.

He blinks and he’s alone, he blinks and it’s the paperburn of the bookshop, he blinks and he’s screaming and he’s screaming and Aziraphale isn’t there and he blinks and he’s choking on the saltruin of Carthage. The Acropolis of Athens, the Persepolis, the Globe Theater in 1613.

One after another, an endless ache of ash and fire and ash and fire and smoke tearing up from his lungs, a relentless burn.

He blinks and it’s the Garden, ablaze.

_See what you’ve done? _Her voice curls around him, the smokeblister scent of burn and fear. His heart isn’t beating, his breath isn’t coming. It’s not his garden, it’s not _his _garden—it’s _the _Garden. He knows it immediately, he knows it like he knows his own (_it is his own, it’s always been his, since the moment he first slithered up from the bowels of Hell it’s been his)_.

The crackleburn of holy power underlining the sandsalt breeze that carries only smoke now. Only smoke and char and the boil of the lake turning to steam and sludge.

_This is your fault. _

“No,” his throat wrenches. “It’s not—it’s not—it’s—”

The smoke doesn’t clear, but his eyes adjust, through the coalblack and the filthy wind he spots the broken bodies littering the grass. Impact-shattered wings and spines, tangled limbs still—too still, too black, too golden. The edges of their greycast wings smoulder, sparking flames from nothing and setting fire to the dry grass around them.

An inferno at the heart of creation. _It’s not my fault. _

The roses are blackened, the sunflowers collapsing under the hellblaze of it all. There are angels broken in his garden. The bloodstench of death and fires knotting up under his tongue and he knows what he’s going to find.

His feet move without his permission, picking his way across the garden, the places he crawled once on his belly, the places he roamed, the places he called home.

Crowley knows his way to the apple tree—six thousand years and he’s never forgotten (it’s two steps forward, two steps to the right, two steps back, two steps to the right), six thousand years and it’s muscle memory for steps he’s never taken. The last time he’d been here had been a serpent, the second name he doesn’t wear anymore, the second-self in a long line of selves that burn and rebuild and re-burn again.

It’s a pull, her voice a gentle-pierce croon. _Look at what you’ve done. _

(_He’s under the tree)_

Crowley knows this before he approaches (a blink and it’s Rome, a blink and it’s Antioch, a blink and it’s the Globe—it was Aziraphale’s hand he’d grabbed, before he turned on Crowley and snarled in his fear-poisoned well of worry. He burned his wings in the library, stretching them over a half-conscious angel. He yanked him out of the theater, pages of the last-lost play turning to kindling behind him).

Ash and black, cindercrumble wings and goldblack blood. He can _smell _it, doesn’t want to look at it, he can’t look at it, he can’t look at falling stars anymore.

The tree isn’t burning and the angel beneath it isn’t moving. His eyes squeeze shut, pulling against some desperate need to _look. _

_Look at him, look at what you’ve done. _

“I didn’t do this,” he says, “I didn’t.”

_You did. You’ll make him burn. _

“No—it wasn’t _my fault. _It was your fucking _ineffable game, _wasn’t it? You did this, you did all of this, you could have—” His hands fly up to the sides of his head, threading through his hair and yanking at the firewild locks. It smells like burning things, burnt hair, burnt feathers, the unholy stench of fallen angels, too close, too close to be anything else. “You could have _stopped it. _You could have stopped _all of it.” _

_You could have prevented it. _

_You could have prevented all of it. You didn’t need to tempt her, you didn’t need to give her the fruit. You started this all, you set the first spark in this garden._

_You ruined the garden, and now you’ll ruin him too._

“Stop—” _Crowley—wake up. “_I said _stop.”_

_(Crowley, wake up, dear, please.)_

“Don’t tell me what to do, you don’t get to _tell me what to do.” _

_(Crowley, **please.**)_

There’s blue light when he bolts upright, two preternatural pinpricks leaning close to him—a worrywell fixated on the places where Crowley’s heart was trying to make a valiant escape from his chest. It beat mercilessly against his pulsepoints.

_Smoke. Smoke, it all smells like smoke it tastes like ash it_—his breath comes ragged, fingers knotted in his hair.

“Crowley, you were—you were having a nightmare, dear.”

_You’ll make him burn. _

Fuck. _Fuck_.

A hand rests there, at the sharp point of his knee, and Crowley jerks away on instinct—_don’t cut yourself on me, you’ll bleed out there in the garden—you’ll singe yourself. You’ll burn, She said so, She said you’ll burn. _

It’s impossible to ignore the flash of grief in Aziraphale’s eyes, the hesitation as his hand lifts—

“I’ve got to—” his throat is ragged, burning and torn. It tastes like smoke, it still tastes like smoke and ash and _you’ll burn him _and _look at what you’ve done _and _your sort. _“I have to go.”

“Crowley—”

“Sorry, sorry, angel, I can’t—”

In the distance, all he can hear is ragged breathing and the thunderstorm finally upon them. Aziraphale doesn’t follow as he tears the sheets back _I have to, I have to, I — I have to (I don’t know where, I don’t know what, I can’t be here I can’t be here), _it’s smoke on his tongue, a burning sort of bile that churns around the afterburn left in his stomach.

“Crowley, _please.” _

He can’t look at him, he can’t turn around. (He doesn’t need to look at him, he doesn’t need to turn around and see the fearcoil of him there on the bed. The worrypress of his lips, the pain in his bluevase eyes.)

So he doesn’t. Crowley pushes through the bedroom door. This can’t be anything else, this can’t be—this _has _to be Her. She’s back in his head, She’s back in his nightmares, haunting the spaces that She tore Herself out, a fucking spector ruining everything.

All she does is echo and ring and something claws its way up his throat, a slithering sensation wrapping around him and around him and around him—_you’ll burn him up. _

_(no no no I won’t, I won’t—he won’t)_

He knows his way to his apple tree by memory, but he doesn’t go there. Freezing rain whips at his face as he tries to suck down clean air, clean breaths—_it’s nothing, it’s nothing, it’s nothing. _But he can’t clamber back onto himself, his skin crawls and twists around him and his eyes screw shut—

All he tastes is smoke and ash, the burn of holyfire under his tongue. _Fuck, fuck, fuck. _He can’t breathe, he can’t breathe—he doesn’t _need _to breathe, but even parting his lips drags in the taste of sulfur, the blisterburn of the rain on his tongue—it all tastes like fire, like char and ash gritting between his teeth, _the sand, the sand in Eden, picking through the bodies in Rome, begging, begging, anyone who would listen to not let one be Aziraphale—he asked in Antioch, he asked when London burned, watching St. Paul’s be gutted, Her name on the tip of his tongue knowing, knowing, knowing Aziraphale might’ve been in there._

_He blamed the burns on his hands and knees on the hellwrought flames. His blistered palms shoving through every door, smoke-shredded throat screaming Aziraphale’s name until he found him in his half-choked delirium. His feet still bear the scars of holy ground, dragging Aziraphale—ash-grey and bleary-eyed—to safety. _

He’s pulled him to safety, pulled him out of the inferno and out of the fires and flame—but who is going to pull him from this one? _You set this fire, this one is all you. You’re a fucking ignition switch, a petrol-can under a match. _

Crowley’s in his greenhouse before he can realize, his hummingbird heart clinking against the back of his teeth as he kicks the door shut behind him.

The ceaseless pelting of rain against the greenhouse roof is almost as deafening as the rushing blood and rage that boils like the ocean in Crowley’s ears. His teeth set on edge as he wheels back and kicks the empty watering can clear across the floor, letting it land somewhere with a frightful rattle and bang.

Fuck Her.

Fuck Her, fuck Her, fuck Her.

Fuck Her and fuck this place and fuck the South Downs and fuck his stupid fucking apple tree and fuck Aziraphale and _fuck him._

Her voice curls around behind his ear, it whispers against the back of his tongue. _You’ll burn him like you burned all of humanity._

“Shut up, shut up, shut _up,” _He grasps the shears he’d left on the table from the rose trimmings on the table and pelts them at the window, not bothering with a wince as the glass shatters under the force of his tumultuous rage. Outside the wind howls and the ocean churns and Crowley’s flash-bang urge to destruction reaches a fever pitch like no other.

“You fucked them over, you kicked them out of the garden—and it wasn’t even, even if it _was _me—” he hisses, arms thrown open to the emptiness around him. “Look at what you did to me—tell me, go on, tell me what the plan was, huh? Was this—was this supposed to happen? You—you said I asked too many questions, I was too loud, I was too—I _asked questions.”_

The skies shatter and rumble in response. “Look at me. You want to see what an angel looks like burned?” he demands, wings unfurling to remind Her of Her sins. _“Look at me.” _

Scarred along their edges, the places where she sealed his eyes shut forever, where she gouged his ability to see and feel from his body, places where she wrenched him from his body. The blackened spaces between his wings, a feverpitch night crawling up the length of his back. Sulfur-burned and night-wrench twisted.

His shirt melts to nothing and he shakes himself out, exposing every line and scar and mark she forced upon him.

“All I did was ask questions — was that too much for you? You couldn’t answer a fucking question?” Snarling at nothing, snarling at the storm, at the circumstance, at the plants and the tree and the Heavens below and Hells above, he whips the empty terracotta pots and the spade and the spare pairs of boots and gloves around the greenhouse until he’s left with nothing but spiderwebbed cracks and terrified plants.

They shiver, leaves trembling in the wake of the hurricane that threatens their home. They cower from him.

They_ cower from him. _

“You think you know,” he hisses, something sparking low in his eyes. It boils like sulfur and smoke, like the bounds of Hellfire and the brink of oblivion. He rounds on a ficus, the one that reeks the most with the stench of fear. “What it means to be afraid?”

He touches a leaf, watching it crumble and fall to dust, to nothing, to hopelessness right away. Ash. It becomes ash and salt as he brushes down another.

He wonders, for a moment, if a ficus felt pain. If it hurt. If it _burned. _

Brackish water soaks his cheek as the floor of the greenhouse starts to puddle with water. Crowley steps over the broken glass, heaving the pot along with him by the rim. “You have no idea,” he decides, using his spare hand to drag the table back to the center. “What pain is. You have no idea what it is to hurt, what it is to _burn.” _

The ficus doesn’t respond, it can’t respond. It sits, like Crowley did on his hands and knees while She wrenched the love out of his body. It sits there like nothing is happening, it sits there and stares back at him, paralyzed by fear, as She stands over him, ripping him out of his own body, as she tore herself, her love, her light from his Essence like it was nothing. He couldn’t do anything but sit there as She tore him apart seam by seam, flaying him apart until he was broken back down to nothing at all, until he _was _nothing at all.

She held him down, like she did all the others, She tore the grace of his wings and the light from his essence and the love from his body like the vulture that tore out Prometheus' liver every day, she ripped his Self from him.

His fingers run across the snake on his temple. She branded him. She held him down and she branded him, she seared the serpent into his Essence, She promised no matter what form he took, no matter who he was or where he went, She would _force _him to see himself. To be reminded of what he’d become, of what he’d done and what he did. She promised he would never be the same again. She promised he would never be able to hide himself.

She carved the serpent into his Essence the same way She carved it into his flesh.

He stares at the plant, which looks terrified and still all at once.

"You think you know what it feels like to be afraid?" he asks, for a second time, voice barely above a dark, scratching whisper. He touches a leaf and it sizzles, burning — the flame climbing and reaching to engulf the whole plant.

Unlike Crowley, the ficus doesn’t scream when it’s burned.

Neither do the azaleas. Or the little fledgling tomatoes that haven’t done anything wrong but deserve to suffer because they are _there. _They are in his path and he isn’t merciful, he isn’t merciful like She isn’t merciful.

By the time he’s done, with the ruins of Eden surrounding him, the rain has run the ash to mud around his bare feet. _When did he lose his shoes? When did he give up manifesting them, when he did he become so bare? _

_You want me to live my nightmare? You want me to burn again and again and again for you? Is this what you wanted? Tell me—for the love of your fucking self, tell me what you wanted. Tell you wanted me to hurt, tell me you wanted me to be fucking devastated, tell me what you wanted to happen, tell me what you wanted from me. _

_What did you expect? What did you want?_

The mix of burning and smoke and agony and pain stings, it slithers up through his nose and into his tongue and up to the back of his throat.

For a moment he feels something he never thought he’d feel again. A tug of light, like phantom pain from a missing limb, simmers somewhere low inside of him. A calling card, a promise, a vow, a soft little croon to step forward. Out of the shadows into the light.

It would seem he got Her attention.

It tastes like London in 1666. It tastes like Antioch. Like all the fires he ran into, like the phantom burn buried deep under the salt and ash in his lungs. Like every memory he pretended not to hold, like every night he sat awake, sitting on the rooftop, staring into the emberlight of his cigarette and recalling the cherryred hearth that once was Rome.

Crowley walks, feet dragging, out of the greenhouse and into the garden. The garden.

The Garden. The rain beats against his skin, soaks the ever-burning feathers of his wings and washes the ash from his bare flesh. His eyes turn up to the wrathful clouds that churn, empty and full at once.

All he tastes is the bitter sting of bile and rage and hatred on his tongue, all he can feel is the siren-call of Her somewhere beyond reach, somewhere where he still can’t touch her, somewhere where she’s off taunting him, promising him things he’ll never be able to have again.

“Is this what you wanted? You wanted me to be a demon?”

The whisperheat of Her on him (not Her Light, no he’s not permitted that anymore. He’s not allowed to feel Her Grace, her Glory—all it is is the sweetfire of her steadfast disappointment) — it doesn’t fade. Nothing burns and sparks with her response.

It’s silence.

For so long.

The realization strikes him with all the force of a dying star, with all the suddenness of a flash flood, all the rage of a heartbreak. It wrenches something out of him, it takes everything he cannot explain and twists it around and around and around until it’s the dense agonized ball lodged deep in his throat.

The wind howls, the rain beats against his skin. “You wanted _this_?”

She wrote his path—his past, his future—into him from his creation. From the moment She dipped Her fingers into a river of starstuff and wrought him from nothing, She set his destiny in motion. He saw, in his fall, everything he would do. All he would become, all he would play party to.

He would always fall because he would always fall. And he would always fall because She knew he would fall because she saw his future and she saw his past.

A cosmic loop, endlessly spinning on itself—no beginning, no end.

The Ouroborous has always been a snake, hasn’t it? Mouth to tail, consuming itself, again and again. No beginning, no end. A constantly churning circle, spinning itself mad behind him—the writhing serpent a taunting phantom of the halo he was never meant to have.

She made him like this. She took the soil from the Earth She had yet to make and She made an angel full of questions. She shaped him to be imperfect, She gave him all the thoughts and dreams and questions he’d later ask Her.

His brand starts to ache, sear and burn and throb with the memory of Her. His fingers touch it once more, and he thinks about what Caesar must have felt when Brutus sunk the hot steel into his back. He thinks about Judas, about Ephialtes. The way She stroked his cheek before she turned him inside out, before she laid bare his future before him, before she created agony from the stars he made and gave it back to him, burned into his Essence (_what you are is what you always will be, what you always were)._

She held him and bestowed a newly-made pain upon Her star-hanger.

Her maker of nebulae and beauty.

Her lamb.

“You made this happen.”

The angel she made just to Fall.

His wings reach towards the ends of the Earth, stretching like a corvid about to take flight—like he could climb the impossible heights up to where She waits, to where he knows She is watching him. He throws his head back, summoning down from the core of the Earth itself all the rumbling power of his once-Graceful voice. The voice he could have used to shatter eardrums, the voice that sang and shrilled and screamed. It reverberates, echoes in the shadows of himself. It crawls through his stomach, his legs, the empty-cold caverns in his chest and out through his throat, bursting like molten rock from the back of his throat.

He wants to curse Her, to ask why She did this, why She hurt him when all he ever did was love her. (_What was so wrong about that? What was so bad about loving her, what was so bad about needing her and wanting her? Where did he go wrong?_)

All that comes is the strangled scream of shattered glass, of the groaning metal of the empty skeleton of the greenhouse. The scream of a son betrayed, of a sun’s collapse. The mud and ash and fear-salted rainwater rush up to meet him, his knees sinking into the cold, unforgiving, merciless Earth.

The world at once recoils.

The trees whip back, the ocean flows backwards, and She keeps watching.

Waiting.

His head hangs, heavy, with the weight of newfound knowledge. Is this how Eve felt? Knowing at once that she was party to Sin’s creation. How heavy was her brow, how did that apple turn to hardened steel in her stomach, a weight she would carry in her stomach until the moment Crowley lit her funeral pyre.

Was Persephone always destined to be the mother of winter? Would she always stain her fingers pomegranate red, always swallow the seeds of damnation? (She’s the lucky one, _she does not know what winter is — only that she is what causes it._) Pandora didn’t have a choice. She would always open the box, she would always give the world all the agonies of living. A pawn in the game of creation, where nothing mattered but the will of those above you, where pain is a gift carved from the very stars you hung in the sky yourself. The first things to burn.

She took their fire and gave it to him. Crowley would always ask questions, he would always Fall, he would always be in the Garden, he would always tempt Eve. Fixed points in time. In space. The end of days was written in sand, but this is etched in the stone wall of Eden.

Was the crown of thorns so heavy too?

He collapses forward, shoulders shuddering under the weight of wretched sobs. Fingers dig into soil—cold, unmerciful, and empty as he is—and She watches.

“Leave me alone, leave me alone, leave me the _fuck _alone.”

The rainwater beats his wings, races in thick rivers down his spine.

“I don’t want your answers, I don’t want your _merciful answers. _I don’t want _anything from you. _All I _did _was love you, all I did was—all I did was try to do what you wanted. All I did was love you, why wasn’t that enough? Why didn’t it matter? Why couldn’t you just _love me _like you said you did?

Why couldn’t you still love me?”

In the same moment as his fists beat the ground, She sings for him—a piercing cry that wrenches another agonized noise from the back of his throat. She resonates through him, a cacophony of pain and love and agony and fire and light that he forgot he’d had, all summoned up from nothing and stretched taught like the nerves she runs her bow across—

She says his name, his _name. _

Above the cries of rolling thunder and the wail of the cutting winds, something clatters in the direction of the cottage.

“Crowley!”

The tension that held him up, like a thousand hands wrapped around his wings, vanishes at once, leaving him tumbling back down towards the Earth, grass and mud sliding under his stomach as his limbs give out under the Heavenly boot above him.

“Lord, Crowley—” He recoils, hard enough to _hurt, _as Aziraphale’s hands touch his back. Don’t touch him, don’t touch him—don’t poison yourself with his flesh, don’t take what he wants so badly to give. He’ll ruin, he’ll burn you.

He’ll burn it all.

“Dear.” His voice wobbles, it threatens to break and shatter and Crowley can’t—he just can’t. He refuses to open his eyes, he refuses to look at him. “What happened? What—”

A hand falls, like a half-lost feather somewhere between everything and nothing, between his shoulder blades. “Your greenhouse.”

It’s a gasp, a mournful noise that stops the ragged panting frozen in the back of his lungs. It takes a moment for him to realize the rain isn’t falling on him anymore. He can hear it, against the leaves, against the ground, the ocean. Against Aziraphale.

It sounds like Eden. Teeth gritting together, he can’t stop the ruthless tide that sweeps over him—the riptide of memories, of the way the seventh-day sun caught Aziraphale’s eyes, his hair—the smell of sand that didn’t know it could be so wet, the first smell of the first rain. The way it invaded every one of his senses, the way the heat around them turned into something else, something sticking to their skin and wrapping them close.

A dull-burning heat somewhere in the pit of himself, like hot stones beneath the scales he didn’t have anymore. The heat of Aziraphale’s Essence, far too close for comfort, but Crowley didn’t mind, he didn’t mind because he was there and he was there and—

He opens his eyes. Aziraphale’s wings look just as white as they did under the cold-cast light of the first thunderstorm. They didn’t catch light, didn’t scatter the wavelengths, didn’t send fractals cascading and fading in time around them.

They produced it. Blazing, fire-white and love-white. He blinks up at the wings stretched over him, Aziraphale’s hair plastered to his skin by the downpour that refuses to stop.

“Crowley,” he begs, thumb working circles under one of the thousand-odd scars that slash through the whole of his being. The places he was torn apart and put back together wrong.

“She—” He chokes, filthy fingers reaching for Aziraphale’s face—they stop just short, hovering in the heavy moment. He can’t touch him, touch him and he’ll soil him,_ touch him and you’ll ruin him. Ruin the blaze-white of his wings, ruin the blue of his eyes the same way you ruin the ocean and the skies. Burn him out, hollow him with your flames like a toppled candle to a forgotten text. You’re flint and he’s steel. Sulfer-tipped matches with charcloth wings, glinting edges and sharp corners in a fucking tinderbox of no escape. _

_You’ll burn him. _

Turn his Essence to ash the same way you did all the other things you claimed you loved.

Ruin him the same way you’ve ruined everything else you’ve ever touched.

You fucked over Eve, you fucked over humanity. Eden never would’ve flooded, Eden never would have burned.

Aziraphale turns his cheek to the muddied fingers, pressing his brand-hot skin to the frozen sweep of his palm.

“Don’t—” He warns, flinching away, but Aziraphale refuses. His other hand, the one not busy, takes him by the wrist, welding them together despite the mud and dirt and grass and sediment. In the darkness it looks ash-black, like the remnants of burning flesh and the crumble-black-nothingness of Crowley’s own wings.

“Talk to me, Crowley.”

He can’t, he can’t summon the bile-thick words from his throat, he can’t choke them out from his lungs like the sludge-black tobacco-thick tumors that rot inside of half the humans they shared cigarettes with outside the Scala. His forehead presses to Aziraphale’s collar, wretched sob choking out of him. The empty floodplains inside him fill, sweeping with the endless rain that threatens to drown him from the inside out.

Talking means expressing means feeling means _confession. _A holy rite that burns his tongue pitch and tar with just a thought.

He can’t. He just can’t. She’s shorn the strength from him one final time, taking a fistful of his hair and dragging Her knife through the locks to leave him prone before the Philistines. His eyes squeeze shut against the rain-slick slide of Aziraphale’s throat, he can’t—he _won’t—_look up to him.

_I can’t see you like this, I’d rather be blind, I’d rather have my eyes gouged—She shut the rest of them, left me with only these two and I never knew it was a punishment until now. Please please please, don’t make me look at you, don’t make me look at how much you revile me—you have to, you have to hate me now. You know what I am, you know what I am now._

_She showed me. She showed you. _

Soft hands smooth over the back of his head, fingers carding through the spilled-wine locks there with an effortless care. Gentle. Thumb stroking over a lock, nails dragging over his scalp.

“Please, my love?”

Her song echoes in his ear, a thrumming of his name mixed with all the knowledge he wasn’t supposed to have. A confession from Her, something She always knew he’d need and always knew She’d never want to give.

_My broken star. _

He can’t move, so Aziraphale does it for him. Gathering the hard-lined bones and flesh and muscle that comprise this corporeal form, Aziraphale pulls him, guiding him with lovesoft hands, and kisses him.

They’ve kissed so many times in so many places. They’ve traded first kisses in bookshops, fast-half-chaste kisses around corners, quick pecks that scream _I love you I love our domesticity _over dinners and teas and lazy _thank whoever and whatever that you’re still here with me _kisses in the cool dawnlit morning. They’ve had heated, sloppy kisses that aren’t kisses at all but the frenzied slide of slick lips on lips as Aziraphale consumes Crowley from the inside out—kisses laced with pants and whimpers and pleas and praises. Kisses like wine and whiskey, burning across his tongue and into the back of his throat where they linger and dance and waltz in perfect 3/4 time.

They’ve kissed so many times Crowley’s lost count. Kisses that say _I love you, I’m sorry, I forgive you, please forgive me, I swear I didn’t mean to break your favorite teacup I’m just an idiot. _Kisses that mean everything, kisses that mean the world could end again and _I would be there right at your side, grasping to you until my very last breath._ Kisses that mean _I’ll never leave you please, please don’t ever leave me please I’d be lost without you — I could never do this without you. _

Imploding stars, trembling Earth, the bitter taste of acidic love that you don’t know how to begin to comprehend.

They’ve shared so many kisses.

Crowley doesn’t know what this one tastes like. It tastes like brackish rainwater and the grit of the soil from his garden. It tastes like the dying embers of a wildfire and the Hell-sent tinge of feathers burning up in the atmosphere. Like the double on the rocks he’d been drowning his sorrows (himself) in. (triple? More? How many had he had before Aziraphale swept in? How many times did his nails tap the glass and the icemelt resolidify and the level on the bottle he was staring past lower? The bottle was full, near-new, when he started.)

Aziraphale kisses him with all the Heaven-sent fervor and love only an angel can conjure. Fingers in his hair, wrenching and twisting them together like Crowley might slip away—he kisses him like the press of his lips can melt the fractures of his impact-shattered Essence back together, like he can hold back the evershifting nature of the Earth beneath them and the claws of time and Fate around them.

“I destroyed the Garden.” The wind has long-settled but it still pulls from his lungs. _I’m a fuck up, I’m a mistake - I ruined everything. I ruined us from the beginning. I spent six thousand years thinking I could fix it, I could be something else, six thousand years thinking you could forgive me. _

_If I hadn’t tempted Eve, if I hadn’t taken that fucking dive, if I hadn’t followed you to Rome, to Italy, to the ends of the Earth just to glimpse the edges of your Light, if I hadn’t kissed you, if my flat — if I hadn’t if I hadn’t if I hadn’t. _

_Tempter. _

_All I’ll ever be. I ruined her, I ruined you, I ruined us. I can’t be anything more for you, I can’t be anything less. I can only be this. _

Aziraphale’s breath is apple-sweet, heavy with all the things Crowley doesn’t want to hear right now, all the things he doesn’t want to know.

“It’s okay,” he says, and the rotting core of Crowley’s heart lodges itself in his throat. “It’s okay, dear — we can fix it.”

“We _can’t—“ _

“We _will.” _There is a tremble, a sort of resolve that _sings _of fireswords and steel wrapped in tender-soft skin.

Judas-yellow eyes turn up towards him, drinking in the rainsoft blue (his hair is darker, plastered against his skin, the drip, drip, drip down from his temple).

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, angel,” he says, lips forming the words and lungs pushing up the air to breathe them before Crowley can manage to swallow them back down, to hold them where they belong—buried somewhere in the pit of himself.

The feathersoft hand slides from his hair, against the rise of his cheek. “My dear, you’ve done _nothing _wrong.” Crowley’s eyes slide shut, looking at him, watching that incomprehensible love swarm and crack and pour out over the edges of him. It’s blinding in the worst (best) ways. “There is nothing to forgive, nothing to apologize for.”

In a single movement, he lurches forward, burying his nose against Aziraphale’s collar, and tangling his brokenhearted arms around his neck, clinging to Aziraphale with all the mournful desperation of a love-lost child. Wings and arms fold back down around him, cradling Crowley’s bareboned body against his own.

“Hush,” he whispers into firelock hair, “I’ve got you.”

It’s in the rainsoaked fever-nightmare of this moment, with the too-warm rainwater dripping off Crowley’s nose, smearing into Aziraphale’s shirt, that Crowley’s tongue runs over the teeth of his old name, of the self he used to be. The name of an angel hung up in the stars, an angel who touched the boundless edges of the universe and curled the wondrous and curious heelnips of infinity outwards from his chest.

A parting gift from the mother that forsook him.

He pulls back, lips parted and eyes caught up in the bonebright shiver of Aziraphale’s Essence—it leaks around him, it curls and twists and ripples like starlight.

“Don’t,” Aziraphale says, thumb finding the edges of Crowley’s lip. “Not if you don’t want to.”

He swallows it back down, and kisses the name into Aziraphale’s mouth. _Taste me, taste who I used to be. Know me as I have known you, love me as I have loved you—know me, know me, know me. _Crowley’s fingers drag up to Aziraphale’s jawline, they cut to his cheek, into his hair.

He pushes the word against his tongue like a prayer, like an embittered whisper of _please, please don’t leave me. You know this now, you knew it was me in Egypt, you knew it was me at the pool of Bethesda. Tell me you knew, tell me this isn’t a surprise, tell me you heard my name on the sunripped whispers, tell me you knew when I pushed my hands on you and healed the burns from St. Pauls. It burned me to do it. A trade, your wounds for mine, your touch for mine. _

_Tell me you always knew (Tell me you don’t care)_

“Crowley,” Aziraphale groans, low against his lips. “It never mattered to me. The only thing that matters to me is _you. _You as you are now, you as you are when you love me. That is the _only_ thing that will ever matter to me. You were a demon when you pulled me from the fire, when you stormed into a cathedral to save me _twice.”_

His timeshattered voice, his desperate stomachchurn of fear. “You remember?”

“I never forgot. I opened my eyes and you were _there. _Saved me a load of paperwork, didn’t you?”

Crowley feels his smile slip, Aziraphale’s sliding down against his lips as well. The moment gone, sucked between them with a crackle of thunder, with the rivers running between them. They don’t talk about it (they never talk about it).

But they do.

It’s in the kiss Aziraphale presses to the corner of Crowley’s lips, it’s in the hands that peel at his soaked jacket, that push his waistcoat into the mud. Aziraphale lays him out there, in the skysoftened ground, his lips at his throat, and his jaw, at his collar. “You’ve always run into fire to save me,” Aziraphale whispers, teeth catching a bit of skin there, where Crowley likes.

(He knows Aziraphale knows. He knows Aziraphale has mapped his body, has learned the dips and curves, learned the places to touch him, to grab him.) He bruises his love there in the seasick salt of his grief-soaked throat, and again, and again.

Crowley’s wings spread out, ravennight black blending into the onyx earth beneath them, the ragedark skies above them. The rain is cold and Aziraphale is hot, a contrast burning its way down his chest, down his stomach, pausing at the cut of his hip to bite another message of eternal affection there.

“I love you,” Aziraphale promises, burying his nose in the space between his thigh and his groin.

It’s there, in the garden, Crowley’s back arching and his Fallblackened claws digging into the wetsoft ground beneath him, that the stars burn behind his eyes. (They’ve always been there, haven’t they? She took them away but Aziraphale gave them back, he hung them in the spaces between Crowley’s ragged-pant breaths every time he swallowed him down, every time he played the length of his cock with that sugarsweet tongue of his.

A slickhot velvet embrace, a twisting wrench of lavapull that collapses around him l_et them cool there, let the fires die down, let the embers reach the edges of their night. Let them cool here, basalt and lavarock—willing victims of another serpent-headed creature, the stone-rock statues of ecstacy._)

Aziraphale swallows him down, fingers bruising insistent points of contact there on his hips, holding him flush down ashfuck of their garden, gently pressing him there against the cold, dark, earth. He swallows him to the root, cock engulfed in the Romeblaze fire of him, working him, swallowing around him, consuming him like cotton in the flames until the stars burn out and burst behind his eyes.

And he swallows him down again. Aziraphale climbs his body, licking the taste of Crowley back into his mouth, wrenching them together to share in the richness of the earth. Crowley digs a claw in to roll them, to push Aziraphale onto his back (his wings drenched in greys and browns, they’ll need to fix this, they’ll need to wash the filth off them later—he doesn’t think about how this might have broken him once, the thought of Aziraphale anything less than _pure._

Anything but the gleamwhite of him, the saltbright hair and the untouched wings.)

He kisses him again. _Let me show you, _he wants to say, godless and hellless slick fingers pushing at Aziraphale’s body, working him open as he slides his tongue past lips again, wrapping the bifurcated muscle around Aziraphale’s, tasting him from every angle—right down the split.

_Remember what I am, _it says.

Aziraphale moans, cock throbbing where Crowley’s other hand fists it. _I do, _it says. _I remember and I love it. _

He replaces his fingers, Aziraphale’s hands grasping at the joint of Crowley’s wings, holding the scarblack parts of him, where his feathers crumble under touch eternally—dripping soot. Crowley’s teeth bare at Aziraphale’s throat, fangsharp and starving for the oyster-soft flesh of him.

Aziraphale gasps, a high-caught noise pushing out through the roof of his mouth. Half-whimper, half whine, as Crowley pushes into him. Fingers tangle in Crowley’s hair, a keening noise escaping as Aziraphale pulls him closer.

“Bite me, please?” He does as he’s bid, lips and teeth and tongue matching the bruises Aziraphale left on him. He sucks one there, right on the muscle of his throat, right where whenever he turns his head it’ll ache and sting. A reminder, always a reminder. _This happened. We happened. _

_This happened. _

He fucks into Aziraphale slowly, the storm above them never abating, never slowing. Stalwart in its rippling rage, its endless call for something, something that neither of them care to understand. Something that they will never grasp for again. Crowley takes Aziraphale, forehead pressed to his throat, then his cheek, then his own, lips brushing lips and nose bumping nose.

They push deeper, further, closer, until nothing can get between them, until nothing can slide and separate them. Not even the light, not even the rain. Aziraphale gasps Crowley’s name when he comes, Crowley groans his back, burying to the hilt and watching the stars fall from behind the velvetcloud night.

Neither moves to separate, neither moves to twist apart. Wings wrap around wings (mud-stained and ashruined, black bleeds to white bleeds to brown bleeds to grey, it’s feathers, just feathers in the cold-cast night, colors mean nothing).

Crowley rests his cheek on Aziraphale’s chest, the mess of them there, nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to hide. The rain will wash it away—slowly, bit by bit. It falls against Crowley’s back, against his wings, turning his lavaflow hair to a mulberry wine, clinging and sticking to the warmdamp of his skin, of Aziraphale’s too. (_Every part of him clinging, every part of him saying don’t let go, don’t let me go let me stay here. With you.)_

“I dreamed about Her.” He says, because he can’t keep it inside anymore. Because it’s broken out of his chest and refuses to come back under lock and key.

Aziraphale’s hands settle low on his back, his wings re-wrap around him. “I presumed that’s what it’s been. You know you could have told me. I could have helped.”

Crowley’s nose finds a bruise. _This happened, this was real. Touch me and remember. _“What could you have done, angel?”

“Held you, like I am now.”

There’s a noise, soft in the back of Crowley’s throat. Dismissive, as ever. “I didn’t want you to have to pick.”

“Pick what?”

Crowley’s throat freezes around the words. _I didn’t want you to have to pick between Her and me. I want you to pick Her every time, I want you to pick Her and never, ever, Fall. (Please don’t pick Her) I’ll run through fire to save you, I’ll drag you from the flames of Hell myself and re-hang you like a star in the sky if you ever did something so _stupid. _(Don’t pick Her, my broken chest can’t take it, my ribs are all shattered, spelling your name in the fragments of me) Please pick Her, don’t ever be like me._

“You know what.”

Hands tighten, wings tighten. “It isn’t a choice,” Aziraphale says, thick-tongued with resolve. “It was never a choice. It was never one or the other.”

_I still love Her, _he wants to say, _I still love Her and I don’t know why. I still love Her and I don’t think I can stop. I never want to hear Her voice rattling in the back of my mind, I never want Her favor, I never want Her mercy, I never want Her again. I only want you, I only ever want you but I think I still love Her. _

_But not as much as you. _

“I love you, angel.” _More than anything, more than anyone, else. _

“And I, you.”

They lie there until the storm passes, until the rain teeters off to nothing and the stormbreak filters through the frozen moonlight. Crowley tilts his head to the side, something catching his gaze the moment he does.

He blinks, for a long while, at the tree in the center of the garden. Nestled there, in the low branches, is a single, perfectly ripe, apple.

He blinks again, and it’s still there. He pushes up, much to Aziraphale’s chagrin.

“Come back down here, Crowley, let’s not—what’s wrong?”

Of course he can read it in the twist of Crowley’s face, in the brow-furrowed confusion that comes from spontaneous fruit. His drymouth swallow doesn’t come close to choking down everything he thinks and everything he feels at once.

An apple in his garden.

He takes to his feet, nude and shameless with wings dragging behind him. The silence settles over in the late-summer rain, something needless and wanting in the moment.

_It’s a mirage, it has to be some mirage. Nothing else. _It doesn’t shimmer, it doesn’t shiver. It sits there, heavy and waiting.

Under curious fingers that brush it, it feels just like an apple. Like every other apple in the world.

“Crowley, dear,” comes the warning behind him. Aziraphale has followed. He was too close to have stayed lying in the fuckwreck of mud and feathers they made of themselves. “What is this?”

“An offering, I think,” he says. His wrist twists once, and the apple pops off its branch. “Or a message.” He rolls it in his palm once. “An ultimatum, maybe.”

He presses the fruit to his nose, eyes flickering up at the shimmerbright stars above him. He breathes it in, for just a moment, lips brushing against the waxsmooth skin.

A hand finds his other, gripping him as though his palm were the last flaming sword. “Whatever you chose.”

The funny thing about love is that to _love _is not necessarily to _need _or to _want. _They can exist together in a tongue-curl of emotions. They can be an effortless marriage of all the right cocktail of all the right things.

Or they could not.

(You can love without faith) Crowley’s fingers release, one by one. The apple hits the stormsoft ground, already worm-bitten and rotten.

“I’m not interested,” he says, eyes to the split Heavens above him. “‘S my garden. I’m not leaving it anytime soon.”

Lips find his shoulder, his neck, his back, the space beneath his ear.

They bathe away their mess back inside, Crowley pushes Aziraphale back down on their feathermattress bed, takes him into his body and lets him whisper how much he loves him into the soft flesh of his throat.

The next morning, there is no apple tree. Just a hollowed out pit where it once stood.

Crowley plants a fig tree. Come fall, come winter, come spring and summer — it is never barren. Not once.

There are no more nightmares, there are no more voices.

There is only a garden, and dreams.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was edited by the lovely curtaincall - without whom I probably wouldn't have had the stomach to post! An additional thank you to the discord for all your support, and for everyone who I bullied into reading this to make sure it was okay.
> 
> Also: there are two song references and two poem quotes. Find them and win a free _ wahoo _
> 
> I'm on [Tumblr](https://crowzi.tumblr.com/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/hipsteroric)


End file.
